Reviews and Features

Jenny Lewis Equal to the Moon

RUTH FAINLIGHT

New and Collected Poems

Bloodaxe £20.00

 

Ruth Fainlight read from her New and Collected Poems last autumn at the Kellogg College Writing Centre in Oxford and I was grateful for the way she navigated a pathway for her audience through this impressive volume. She started with ‘The Empty Lot’, a recent poem which shows the writer, a young Jewish-American girl, alone in her ‘empire’ of weeds behind an aunt’s house at the edge of town, revelling in being a stranger ‘far from the centre’. A metaphor perhaps for her eastern European roots and the itinerant nature of much of her life. (Fainlight was born in New York and has lived in Wales, France, Spain and Morocco, as well as in England.) It could also be a metaphor for her position as observer and chronicler – numbering among her friends figures such as Robert Graves, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

Fainlight’s poetry comes unashamedly from a woman’s viewpoint and displays the influence of other women including her mother, her aunt Ann, and women poets such as Adrienne Rich and Anna Akhmatova. When I interviewed her earlier this year in London, Fainlight, in her own words a ‘feminist since birth’, described to me the impact of first reading Rich, saying of Diving into the Wreck: ‘It struck me like a force of nature’. This New and Collected Poems indicates that she has achieved Rich’s ‘dream of a common language’, covering the universal and the domestic with equal depth and insight. I was struck by the integrity and candour of a voice which deals unapologetically with issues some women poets feel they have to play down, especially those relating to cycles of menstruation and the tidal energies of the moon. In ‘Song’, from Cages (1966), the moon is a ‘wax Madonna’ with daggers in her heart ‘Like the pins in the magic figure / Meant to cause weeping’. In ‘One Phase of the Moon’, from the same collection, the poet, lacking inspiration, identifies with a moon that ‘shines obdurate as scar tissue, / A circle cut from steel sheeting’, who ‘Denies her light reflects from anywhere’ and:

 

Forgets that she can clothe with moving tides

Sea-hidden bones no matter where they lie.

 

In ‘August Full Moon’, from Another Full Moon (1976), we see the moon ‘swollen and clumsy’ darkening from yellow into the ‘mottled red of an / Old woman’s cheek.
As if she had discharged her poisons / Into my veins’. Fainlight says:

 

In that book the tone is ‘Oh bloody hell, another full moon!’ That was my state of mind when I wrote many of those poems. So the moon has been a really significant factor in my life. Because I’m a woman I wrote poems that said ‘If only I could be free of it’, but then I didn’t really want to be free of it. And now I am free of it I feel more an equal to the moon. I’m no longer in her power’.

 

The poems and translations in the book span forty-four years and from the start we are aware of the poet’s clear-sighted gaze that captures, registers and moves on without recrimination or self-pity. The poet’s eyes are used ‘to guard and to repel’ as well as to witness; her worst fear is ‘the taint of cowardice’ and, in ‘My Eyes’, she insists on showing her courage by ‘staring out whatever happens’. Her sympathies lie with the natural world – the trees along the Route Napoléon, planted to ‘absorb the fumes of traffic, clothe / embankments and disguise the motorway’ are like ‘mutilated slaves’; in ‘Trees’, they stand by the roadside, ‘huge mild beings / who suffer the consequence / of sharing our planet’.

In her 1980 collection, Sibyls and Others, a collaboration with the artist Leonard Baskin, deeper currents flow through poems about divination and prophesy. The sibyls are shown hunched, ranting, sinewy, cajoling, veiled, driven mad, harried by wind and rain, hallucinating, blocked. Their words largely go unheeded except for a young sibyl who first appears ‘candid and chaste’ until ‘the voices start / to speak through her throat / in that plangent blare’ and the ‘snapping of reins / and champing of horses’ turn her into a harbinger of war.

There are many poems about paintings and painters. The creative influence seems to flow both ways as sometimes the poem is inspired by the visual image and sometimes vice versa. In ‘A Painting (in the style of Marc Chagall)’ she paints, lusciously, with words:

 

The roses are blue, incandescent with death,

As soft and bruised as a mouth in the dark

And each swollen petal is meshed with pink veins.

 

In ‘A Bowl of Apples’, she compares language to painting and describes how her fingers:

 

            crave the firm touch

of craftsman’s tools, pencil or brush,

my nostrils, the reek of size and paint.

I want to understand and feel

through my own flesh the roundness

and bulk of apple pressed against

apple in the bowl’s shadowy cradle;

 

Another, more recent collaboration, with the American artist Judith Rothschild, started with the poem ‘Pomegranate’, from Sugar Paper Blue (1997). It is developed in ‘Nacre’, a relatively new sequence which has also been produced as a sumptuous book of mezzotints and poems in French and English. The idea started when Rothschild sent Fainlight some prints of oyster shells. At first the poet kept close to the subject of pearls and legends about them, but as time passed the poems became freer. One engraving was inspired by the poem ‘Nacre III, First Forms’, where two pearls forming inside the shell are compared to a young girl’s budding breasts. Another poem ‘Clam Chowder’ is an affectionate tribute to Fainlight’s Aunt Ann, who introduced the young poet to books, art and opera when the poet was a young girl growing up in Arlington, Virginia. The speaker remembers feeling that the clam chowder ‘glistening like nacre / could never be kosher’. Even so, the writer says, she –

 

loved its unctuousness,

the shimmer of grease on top,

like a fat bishop

in his shiny robe and mitred hat…

 

and felt absolved when her aunt appeared after lunch, dressed for the Ladies’ Club with a pearl brooch and ear-studs. In ‘Cowrie Shells’, pearl buttons from her mother’s button box represent an inherited femininity and the depths and shallows of the mother-daughter relationship.

Although many of the poems are free verse, there are some prose poems in Burning Wire (2002) including sections of the long verse sequence, ‘Sheba and Solomon’, a collaboration with the Brazilian print-maker and sculptor Ana Maria Pacheco, formerly Artist in Residence at the National Gallery in London. A sequence about Japan from The Knot (1990), includes a sonnet, a syllabic poem and an effortlessly elegant sestina, ‘Blossom and Technology’, contrasting the extreme delicacy of Japanese art with the country’s twenty-first century industrialisation. The envoi concludes that you can’t anticipate what ‘fuels’ the country:

 

nor expect that so few hours

in Japan could reconcile images

of blossom and technology.

 

Whether exploring new territories, in thrall to the moon, or divining the nature of female symbols, Fainlight’s poetry is infused by the outward-looking adventurousness of the free spirit seen in ‘The Empty Lot’. Despite its intimate, conversational tone, the book represents a colossal voyage of discovery across the decades and Fainlight’s companion on the much of journey was her husband of more than fifty years, the writer Alan Sillitoe. ‘Borrowed Time’, written shortly before Sillitoe’s death last year begins:

 

I feel a bit crazy tonight,

my mood heightened, unstable:

maybe because it’s full moon,

or maybe because we’re living

on borrowed time.

 

The speaker begs the moon –

 

be as generous as you can,

kindly usurer,

give me endless credit.

Later I’ll pay my debts

(I already know

the price will be cruel). Please,

let me borrow again, let us gaze

at you again – and again –

 

It’s a poem that’s as brave and singular as its author, representative of a profoundly authoritative book, which opens up to us a world seen through the eyes of compassionate and enlightened feminism.